Oil on canvas

45 x 39 in. (114.3 x 99 cm)

1917, Glasgow Institute of Fine Arts;

1921 Fine Art Society, 'William Strang Memorial Exhibition'.

1981 Graves Art Gallery, Sheffield, Glasgow Museums and Art Galleries, National Portrait Gallery, London, cat no 26.

"There is", wrote 'Tis' (Colour Magazine, September 1916), "that picture of his entitled 'The Listener'. It represents apparently a coster girl listening to the love offer of a coster. But they are not really coster types, nor are their costumes really coster costumes. Strang s'en fiche: he was concerned with the great fundamental of love-making: he, according to his own explanation, was intent only upon things that matter; hence the plain background, the diagrammatic still-life, the contempt for textures".

It was in works like this that Strang returned to the interests that had stimulated his most successful early works, the 'Adam and Eve' series (1899-1901), where his concern was primarily in simplifying form and colour, and subordinating technique to serve the expressive needs of the subject. The Post-Impressionist exhibitions of 1910 and 1911 had revived this interest, in more contemporary terms, and introduced to him the possibility of a more arbitrary use of colour. The work of Augustus John is an obvious influence in the choice and composition of the coster girl, whilst the still-life of fruit and vegetables relate to an earlier work by his Slade contemporary, W.Y. MacGregor, 'The Vegetable Stall' (1884, National Gallery of Scotland).